September 5, 1967

Books of the Times

By THOMAS LASK

A GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS By Joyce Carol Oates.

o people who are with it, Joyce Carol Oates's new novel will appear highly unfashionable. It is told in strict chronological order, the environment is solid and recognizable, each of the three parts of the novel has its own protagonist and therefore a distinct point of view. The novel is neither outrageously funny nor brutal nor shocking. To be sure, some of the characters lose themselves in drink or indulge in what is euphemistically called unnatural lusts. But they do not do so to achieve higher wisdom; they do it out of low ignorance.

When one character knifes another, it is not because he wants an insight into the criminal mind, but because he is driven by a numbing, blinding rage that he cannot define even to himself and that has little or nothing to do with the man he is about to kill. When a father commits incest, he is not thinking of the collective unconscious or taboo or experiencing life pushed to extremes, but only of his nubile child who is his property -- all the property he has, in fact.

By and large the characters are mindless people who live in these pages, but ignorance is not bliss and it isn't folly to be wise; it is folly to be born at all.

Casual Yet Manipulated

Miss Oates is fashionable also in that there are no curlicues in her technique. She subordinates her language and the structure of the novel to her story. Her prose does not call attention to itself. Yet she is able to maintain the pace of the fairly long work without flagging and without dead spots. It is the kind of writing that appears to be casual when it is carefully manipulated.

Withal, "A Garden of Earthly Delights" is not altogether successful. For two-thirds of the way it is as good as anything the season has turned up so far, but in the last part it slips into a lower key and although the book ends with a melodramatic flourish, we are a little too aware of the melodrama for the ending to have the effect it should.

This third part is devoted to the grandson of a migrant worker, a boy who has become wealthy through his mother's contriving, and to the problems, tensions and peculiar drives he is heir to. But by this time the reader has lived through so many of these crises that he is a little callous to their appeal.

The grandfather, a migrant worker from the South, is conscious that he was better than he is and he still feels superior to the others in the work camp with him. Indeed, this fastidious superiority is effectively used by the author as a contrast to the poverty and filth found in the camp, and to the misery of his life, which unrolls before him without shape or form. His wife, whom frequent pregnancies have reduced to imbecility, finally dies in childbirth.

Inarticulate Yearning

He feels he must break the pattern of his existence, but he doesn't know how to go about it. This dumb, inarticulate yearning, which he cannot put into words, expresses itself in jets of anger in which he lashes out at drinking companions, his wife and his children. Even his favorite daughter, Clara, is not immune and once, when she stays out later than she should, he beats her to within an inch of her life. She runs away with a young man, Lowry, who might have turned into the most original character in the book if the author had felt it worth her while to develop him further.

Unlike Clara's father, Lowry knows he will be trapped by society unless his is wary. Thus a part of him always remains aloof and withdrawn. He is not without feeling and he maintains an interesting and provocative balance between his natural concern for others and his skepticism.

The love affair between Clara and Lowry has an acrid flavor not usual in affairs of the heart. When a boy is born to them, Clara changes into a scheming, vindictive and predatory matron. Lowry leaves and Clara is forced to bring up the boy herself. By her own lights she is more than successful, although the results turn out to be not what she expected.

When dealing with Clara and her father, Miss Oates has then challenged their environment as well as their peers and this adds an energizing dimension to their story that is missing from the account of the boy. The dislocations of society are made more meaningful than the destructive behavior of a strange child.